Author: Franz Kafka (1883-1924) was born the son of a dry-goods shopkeeper in Prague - then in the Austro-Hungarian empire, now the Czech Republic. He studied law, but chose to work for an insurance company to allow him time to pursue other interests. Writing was the principal of these, but Kafka was notoriously reluctant to publish. His student friend, Max Brod, persuaded him in 1913 to allow Meditation, a collection of short stories, to appear. In 1914 he broke off his engagement with Felice Bauer, and began work on The Trial soon after. Diagnosed with TB in 1917, Kafka's health began to worsen and he died in an Austrian sanatorium in 1924. A year later, Brod had The Trial published, disregarding Kafka's deathbed instructions to have his three novels destroyed unread.

Story: The Trial's opening lines - "Someone must have been spreading lies about Josef K, for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one morning" - are among the most famous in literature. K is forced to negotiate a bizarre and apparently impenetrable legal system without ever being informed of the charge against him; attending court, hiring lawyers and presenting pleas. The actual order of the events Kafka describes is the subject of debate, since Brod collated the 10 chapters Kafka had left behind in no specific sequence. Apart from its other qualities, after the second world war The Trial - especially K's brutal execution in a quarry - was seen as a clear presentiment of, and metaphor for, the Jewish holocaust.

Film-makers: By the time Orson Welles (1915-1985) made The Trial he was finished as a Hollywood film-maker. Through the 1950s and 1960s Welles's career comprised acting jobs to finance a string of largely unrealised projects -those that were took years to complete. Welles persuaded Psycho star Anthony Perkins to play K, and hired a group of prominent Europeans - Jeanne Moreau among them - for the rest of the ensemble. Welles himself plays the advocate.

How book and film compare: While keeping to Kafka's narrative progression, Welles tweaks everything along the way. The parable that K hears in the cathedral ("Before the Law stands a door-keeper") is converted into a short prologue, told with a sequence of still drawings. Welles constructed a series of surreal sets in the old Gare d'Orsay, creating a cinematic texture in stark contrast to the "lustreless normality" of Kafka's original descriptions. (Welles even introduces a computer at one point, which K hopes may "figure out" his charge.) Welles also amplifies K's sexual paranoia, turning his co-lodger Fräulein Bürstner (Moreau) into a nightclub dancer, and having K chased by screaming girls. (The way Welles filmed the latter scene was imitated by Richard Lester in A Hard Day's Night.)

Inspirations and influences: The Trial was the first substantial attempt to turn Kafka into cinema, and Welles took the opportunity to return to the expressionist roots of his earlier cinematic works. Hence much of the camera work and set decoration recalls Citizen Kane (1941); there's also a shot of Romy Schneider through a broken mirror frame that is a reference to the famous hall of mirrors scene in The Lady From Shanghai (1947). Welles went further back, however, for inspiration for K's office: the rows of workers at their desks summon up the King Vidor silent, The Crowd (1928).